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Splunk's first quarter was on target with expectations and the company raised its sales outlook for the second quarter and fiscal year.

The company, which focuses on mining operational data from sensors and other devices, reported a first quarter net loss of $16.13 million, or 16 cents a share, on revenue of $57.2 million, up from $37.19 million in the same quarter a year ago. The non-GAAP first quarter loss was 6 cents a share.

The results were in line with Wall Street estimates.

As for the outlook, Splunk projected second quarter revenue of $61 million to $63 million. Wall Street was looking for $61.65 million. Splunk said second quarter operating margin will be negative 4 percent to negative 6 percent on a non-GAAP basis.

For fiscal 2014, Splunk said revenue will be $266 million and $274 million. Non-GAAP operating margin will be about zero. Wall Street is expecting Splunk to break even on a non-GAAP basis on sales of $270.6 million.

Godfrey Sullivan, CEO of Splunk, said that the year was off to a strong start as the company added 350 new enterprise customers. Splunk had 5,600 customers overall.

He said on a conference call:

I spent a lot of time on the road in Q1 with trips to APAC, Europe, and around the US. I probably had 50 individual customer meetings during that period, mostly related to our core markets but also some interest activity in the world of mobile and the Internet of. The biggest change, a year ago we were meeting with departmental managers and our champions. This year most of the meetings are at the CTO, CIO or VP of engineering level.

During the quarter, Splunk announced a bevy of partnerships and product releases with NetApp and Palo Alto Networks.

By the numbers:

More than 30 percent of Splunk's revenue comes from monitoring IT operations.

Splunk's maintenance and services revenue was $21 million in the first quarter. License revenue was $36.17 million.

R&D spending for Splunk was $14.46 million in the first quarter.

Sales and marketing spend was $41.3 million in the quarter.

The company ended the quarter with $331.25 million in cash and equivalents.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CN...
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